Overwatch Kicks off Season 23 With New Competitive Queue System

Overwatch has officially begun its 23rd competitive season, and with it comes a long-awaited change to the matchmaking system.

Around August of 2019, the popular game introduced a new matchmaking system that forced players to select a certain role prior to queuing for a game. The game's roles consist of a tank, support, and DPS (damage per second), and many of the issues that inspired this change were due to the fact that there were many players playing DPS roles, rather than helping push the payload or heal the team. Although defeating members of the enemy team is helpful in the overall game, the Tank and Support classes were included in the game to help push the payload through the enemy defenses and keep teammates from dying as often. With games full of DPS players and little to no support, many players were losing hope in ever winning a match, as there were few Tank heroes to make space for the payload or support heroes that kept players alive. 

Blizzard's new system attempted to combat this issue, and the team composition consisted of 2 players per role (2-2-2) to guarantee a well-balanced team. Many team-focused and dedicated players took this as a blessing, but the casual gamers and those who preferred the DPS role saw this as the death of Overwatch. Due to this role-lock system, DPS players had to wait in longer queue times, as there were many users who preferred the DPS role over those of Tank and Support. Gradually, the game's player base began to lose casual players, and gain more regular gamers that participated in strategic competitive matches. With the launch of this new competitive season, it seems that Overwatch wants to bring back casual gamers, and allow all players to enjoy themselves on the battlefield. 
 

 

With the launch of Season 23, Overwatch offers players a choice between a role-locked competitive game, or one with an open queue, as it was before the 2-2-2 system launched last year. This announcement comes by way of Overwatch's official Twitter page, which touts that this addition will give players "more ways to compete in Overwatch." Since the launch of Role Lock in Competitive and Quickplay, the game added an open-queue competitive system in their Arcade section of game modes, and it soared in popularity. Although this open queue mode attracted more DPS players than those for Tank or Support, it nonetheless gave players a shorter queue time. 

Although many players are excited about this addition, many are curious about how the open-queue system will affect the player rating system, known as SR. The official Overwatch website details that players will have a separate SR for Open Queue games, as well as their role-individual SRs that Role Lock currently offers. This will not only affect the competitive style of games but also allow for fan-favorite compositions to return at a competitive level, such as GOATs. This composition consisted of 3 tank heroes and 3 support heroes, which allowed for teams to keep a consistent amount of healing on their team while using more damage-resistant tank heroes as the DPS, constantly pushing the payload. 

The newest competitive season hopes to bring a wider fanbase to Blizzard's hero shooter, which will hopefully remain in time for the game's campaign-based sequel, Overwatch 2, planned to debut later in 2020 or early 2021.
 

Kieran Mouritsen
Editor, NoobFeed